The official blog of Arden Leigh, the woman behind the Sirens Seduction Forum

11/28/2016

Hi readers. I want to apologize for not updating this blog this year nearly as much as I have in the past. The reason is that, as I stated in my first post of 2016, I committed to a real grounds-up process of healing this year and I have definitely received what I asked for. I've been taking notes all along and I'm so excited to share it with you but I feel it will be more useful if I write about the entire process once I'm on the other side of it. In the meantime, since we're approaching the holiday season, I'd like to make a relatively simple cozy feel-good parable post about my cat. We might have more to learn from him than we think.

This is my cat. His name is Virgil.

Virgil wasn't always my cat. It took a great deal of time before we ended up in the relationship we're in today. My family and I don't know much about the early years of his life as we adopted him as a young adult from a shelter, but even when he came to my parents' home, he wasn't mine. He belonged to my stepdad, which was a case of two people (well, one person, one cat) who were both very well-intentioned but absolutely incompatible. My stepdad, while he likes cats, very much has "dog person" energy. His relationship to pets is very man-bonding buddy-buddy -- sharing snacks, watching tv together, roughhousing, and playfully busting each other's balls -- but without a great deal of physical affection. If cats can have love languages (spoiler, they totally can), Virgil was not getting his needs met for touch and words of affirmation.

When I first met Virgil, he was sitting quietly on the counter in my parents' kitchen. My stepdad introduced him to me with a guffaw, rubbing his knuckles on Virgil's head, and said, "Look at that! That's a face only a father could love!"

"Aww, that's not true," I said, seeing the sadness in Virgil's eyes. "You are a very handsome cat," I told him.

When I say I saw sadness in Virgil's eyes, that might sound melodramatic, or like I'm adjusting the details in hindsight to fit the story. But my whole family talked about it. Virgil was the mopiest cat we'd ever met. My mom nicknamed him Emmett, after Emmett Kelly, the sad hobo clown with the white makeup around his eyes (a marking Virgil also carries). He didn't like the other cats in the house. While his attempts at aggression were pathetic enough not to warrant a problem worth sending him back to the shelter over, he would routinely walk up to the other cats in the house and smack them across the face with his clawless paw, a gesture the other cats would respond to with more confusion than defensiveness. He hated being picked up. If you tried to carry him, he would tense up and growl a very low growl and, if he got mad enough, would start hissing. Never once did we hear him purr. He wouldn't stay where you put him. It had to be his idea alone to be somewhere, and even then, he seemed to do it reluctantly.

I picked him up anyway, and when he hissed at me I told him to stop making such a fuss over nothing. I couldn't get him to stay on my bed for more than a few minutes, but at least he saw that nothing awful came of being carried around. Sometimes he'd run off my bed and out the bedroom door only to come back ten minutes later and hang out like it was his own idea. He'd sit at the bottom of the bed, but if I tried to grab him and cuddle him, he'd get uncomfortable again and run off. I had to just leave him where he was and adjust my own position on the bed if I wanted to be near him.

After a few visits, an astounding thing started happening: my mom told me that after I left their house and went back to New York (where I was living at the time), Virgil would sleep on my bed every night for weeks. If I wasn't back for a visit for a while, he'd give up after a month or so and start sleeping elsewhere. My parents joked that he had a crush on me and was going to start looking through the classifieds for a part-time job so he could court me properly.

When I decided to move from New York to Los Angeles at the end of 2013, I spent six months in between living with my parents in Las Vegas, regrouping, saving some money, and Pinteresting all my home decor ideas for my future apartment. I had brought my own cat, Wesley, a fat brown tabby who acts more like a bulldog than a cat, to live with me there and to eventually move with me to LA. But Virgil really blossomed during the time we spent together. He no longer growled or hissed when picked up. I could take him into my room at night and he would trust me enough to stay on the bed where I put him. He even started purring -- just a tiny vibration at first, completely inaudible, but able to be felt if you touched your fingertips to his throat. My stepdad jokingly called him a traitor, and told me that Virgil was clearly my cat. (He'd already gotten another cat, a certified non-snuggler who just wanted to hang out and eat with him.) And Wesley seemed much happier in Vegas than he'd been in NYC, since now he had other cats to socialize with and a yard he could run around in like the dog he thinks he is. Wesley's needs were about quality time and social interaction. He was happy just hanging out in the living room while the family watched tv. Virgil, on the other hand, needed alone time, touch, and verbal reassurance.

When it came time for me to move to LA, my mom said, "You know, honey, Wesley seems really happy here in the big house. Have you considered taking Virgil to LA with you? I think he would really prefer being in a one-cat household." I had already been thinking the same thing. Virgil moved to LA with me where he could be in a monogamous cat/owner relationship and Wesley stayed in Vegas where he could enjoy a communal cats/people living situation.

During the two and a half years we've been living in LA together, Virgil has become a completely different cat. He jumps up on the bed and rubs his nose in my face. He sleeps on my chest at night, or will curl up on my back if I'm lying face down. He purrs so loudly I can hear him from across the bed, and often he purrs so hard he gets the hiccups and keeps purring anyway. He's friendly to strangers and will eagerly jump up into the laps of my friends when they visit. I've taught him that if he wants people food he needs to sit in a chair at the table like a person and eat from a dish. He sits calmly in the front seat on the long drives to my family's house in Vegas. And not only does he not mind being picked up, he even goes out with me on a leash to coffee shops and restaurants and stays chill about it the whole time.

I've said this before in posts that probably felt far more overtly relevant to seduction and relationships, but the key to trust is time and consistency.

Virgil has one advantage on all of you though. Virgil is really, really dumb.

Virgil's a cat, and like most animals, he doesn't have much of a long-term memory. That means he's not married to carrying all of his past wounds.

As Robert Greene says in Mastery, "Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted -- even for a few seconds -- they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. [...] Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution -- the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind."

Joke's on you, though, humans, because while we got the gifts of planning, reflecting, and reasonably assessing our safety and danger, we also got a shit-ton of anxiety about our future and baggage from our pasts. We carry our wounds around with us even when the threat of danger has long passed. We assign causation to absolute nonsense that just happened to reside nearby the things that hurt us: a five-year-old's logic of "I ate a peanut butter sandwich the day my mom died, therefore peanut butter sandwiches mean I'm going to lose my loved ones" turns into the adult's logic of "I got hurt in my last relationship, therefore relationships mean I'm going to get hurt," or worse, "I hurt someone in my last relationship, therefore I can't be trusted in relationships to not hurt people."

Last night on a long drive with Virgil in the passenger seat next to me, I listened to some of the songs from Jekyll & Hyde, a musical I was obsessed with in my teens. Right before she's brutally murdered, ironically, Lucy, a lower class sex worker cabaret girl who falls in love with Dr. Jekyll but gets preyed upon by Mr. Hyde, sings a ballad titled A New Life. "A new life, what I wouldn't give to have a new life..." I was obsessed with both this role and this song in high school. Even as a teen I was a brunette alto, and I knew that things like happy endings were for blonde sopranos while I was destined by my very hair color and vocal range to be the subject of lust, violence, grief, and heartache. And while in hindsight it was ridiculous to consign myself to a tragic and loveless life at the ripe age of seventeen, the years of parental abuse and unrequited crushes had added up and I really felt I was a hopeless case. But what I missed was that the song ends on the lines, "Just to share its pleasures and belong, that's what I've been here for all along... Each day's a brand new life." Each day's a brand new life.

I don't know if you guys have noticed, but I'm really smart. Trouble is, I used my smartness to lawyer my way into convincing myself that all my issues were unsolvable, set in stone -- or, later in life, that they were permissible because I had managed to transmute them into something positive, and wasn't I still worthy of love even if I didn't believe that I was. Welp, spoiler alert, nope -- I actually had to do the work, and believe you me, that last part of me is going kicking and screaming.

I invite you to forget everything you think you know about love that isn't serving you. Chances are it's here for you right now, all around you, and you're locked into beliefs that tell you it isn't safe for you or for others if you access it. You can be like Virgil and get all the love and snuggles in the world, but you've got to stop hissing at people and you've got to trust them to pick you up once in a while, and you've got to learn to purr even when it feels impossible. It's not impossible. Each day's a brand new life.

06/04/2016

About six months ago I noticed a change in my game. Before sending a text or reaching out, I started thinking to myself, "What would a normal girl do? What would a nice, normal girl who has never studied the art and science of intimate relating say to her crush right now?"

I'm risking the good opinion of a lot of my friends and the goodwill of my community by writing this. But I'm going to call this like I see it: the sex and relationship educator community is running the risk of completely isolating itself from the normal population.

In 2012 I began my journey into the study of intimate relating. I started meeting educators who weren't pickup artists, I became a proud sex geek, I eschewed the deception prevalent within (but not necessarily inherent to) PUA culture in favor of the straightforward, positive, thoughtfully crafted, formulaic communication styles of the relationship elite.

It was early 2013 when I was walking down the streets of NY with my mentor Reid Mihalko (who asked to be named in this post rather than referenced vaguely), and I was complaining about figuring out how to communicate with a man I was seeing. "Could you teach a class on dating muggles?" I asked him excitedly. "I feel like that would be so helpful to single people in the community!"

"Arden," Reid replied to me, "maybe you should just stop dating muggles."

Reid famously coined the phrase Date Your Species, which suggests that people should only date those who are similar enough in ideology to them that a relationship will run smoothly. The idea of finding your pack or your tribe has been with me since my early twenties in the BDSM scene, implanted firmly by Flagg, my first kink mentor, and I still reiterate that principle to my students today. However, there are some deeply problematic assumptions in the idea that I should stop dating people who aren't, if not sex educators, at least very dedicated sex students.

First of all, there's the assumption that I only belong to one tribe. I do belong to the sex educator tribe, and even within that, I am probably one of the only people who fits in equally across the gamut between pickup artists and tantrikas. I've hung with the guys wearing fuzzy hats and I've hung with the white people wearing bindis. But I also have a band, and in my band I have a tribe, not just in my own collaborators but in the social scene that supports it, in the parties and goth clubs I frequent. I have a tribe in the fetish scene, which somehow forms a spectrum between my sex educator friends and my goth friends, with the former clan geeking out on different ways to tie rope on a person and the latter going to parties to dress up and dance to industrial. I also have friends in the occult community, which blends the spirituality of tantra with the goth culture of the music scene and often throws a bit of comics geekery in for good measure. In New York I had parkour and krav maga friends, people who chose to focus their intelligence far less on linguistics and far more on the use of their physical bodies. And all of these people have had just as much heart and humanity as the people I know in the sex geek scene. If you want to make the argument that everyone should be learning the skills of intimate relating, you will get absolutely no fight from me on that -- pretty much everybody intimately relates, and pretty much nobody attempts to learn how to do it well. But if you try to tell me that my friends are somehow less worthy, somehow not good enough because they've chosen to focus their efforts on a different skill set that they're passionate about in the way that I am passionate about relating, then we are going to have some words.

Interpersonal intelligence is not the only kind of intelligence.

Another issue here that my friend Ashley Manta pointed out is that suggesting one date only within the sex geek community is classist, because most of the trainings available to sex geeks are fucking expensive. Ashley and I agree that we have been very lucky that as educators ourselves, we add enough value to our community that we are often invited to participate for free when we're not getting paid to present. I've audited weekend-long courses by volunteering my time; I've sat at the backs of crowded auditoriums full of people who paid hundreds or thousands of dollars a ticket for the same information I've gotten just for showing up and being Arden Leigh (granted, being Arden Leigh takes a lot of time and money in itself). To insist that I only date people who can afford to be participating members of the community is to rule out a very large economic class, when my dating history has run the gamut from literal billionaires (okay, ONE literal billionaire) to people who turned to sex work out of poverty. True, most sex educators I know post free content on the internet, which you only need wifi to access, but cutting out the expensive social aspect of the community means that I am probably not going to meet those people in my sex geek tribe and so they're irrelevant in the face of the suggestion to stop dating muggles.

Further, let's remember that it's not easy to seek out help with sex and relationships, even if the money is available. We live in a culture that expects us to just intuitively understand sex and communication, and which, if we seek education in it, shames us for either being inferior or broken, or for being too sexual, too desirous, possibly perverted and dangerous. How many people can actually turn to their coworkers and say that they're going to a weekend-long training about relationships? Participating in a training is a silent admission that we're not already good at something that's supposed (air quotes) to come naturally. To only date people who participate in this community is to show a lack of compassion for how difficult and stigmatized that participation so often is.

The solution lies in better sex and relationship education on a public, infrastructural level, starting in high school, or even earlier for subjects like nonviolent communication and active listening. Yeah, we all should be better at this. But we can hardly blame people if they're not. The word "muggle" in this context shames and others anyone who doesn't put effort into educating themselves about sex and relationships, which is literally almost everyone.

And the problem with learning relationship as a skill set in our community, especially as a single person, is that when you do inevitably meet and perhaps even fall in love with a muggle, your knowledge has the potential to create an immediate rift in your intimacy. Back in the fall I wrote an entry about how devastating it is to lose people because they aren't having the same growth experiences you are and they feel insecure trying to keep up with you. Even when you try your hardest to be positive, complimentary, solution-oriented, even when you try your damnedest to use your skill set to work out issues in your relationships rather than further tangle them up in knots, there's still so often this sense of othering, this feeling that only one of you is competent at the thing you're both attempting.

I thought it was funny how my friend Conner, the same person who told me last year that he imagined my lovers must feel humiliated and resentful dating someone who's smarter than they are in the very arena in which they have to relate to them, described LA-based vegan/organic/holistic lifestyle restaurant Cafe Gratitude as a place that "makes you feel so good about yourself and so bad about yourself at the same time" because it immerses you in a healthy lifestyle that is likely impossible for you to maintain when you're not eating there. "Holy shit, Conner, that's just it," I muttered, stunned. "I'm the Cafe Gratitude of girlfriends."

As sex geeks, we create language around intimate relating that is designed to foster communication, resolve conflict, and increase sexual intimacy. We learn formulas, sometimes literally step by step, for how to talk about safer sex, for how to ask your lover how they like to be touched, for having difficult conversations. We have catchphrases that we use as shorthand to communicate larger sentiments, like the way we say "Thank you for taking care of yourself" when someone denies our request, which is essentially a way of acknowledging that their honoring their "no" is better for both of us than giving a "yes" they don't mean. And I love and appreciate my sex geek friends for how much they want communication to be that easy, I love them for believing that these solutions can work across the board. Trouble is, when you're talking to a normal person and they tell you that no they can't, say, make it to your birthday party, replying "Thank you for taking care of yourself" makes you sound like a sarcastic asshole. And having a step-by-step conversation about safer sex that's any more detailed than "we need a condom!" with a band dude backstage makes you sound like a weird sex robot, possibly one who's too bizarre or high-maintenance to even be worth fucking when there are so many other willing girls out there who don't make sex sound so dour.

In retrospect I think it was really cute of younger me that I thought that the way to achieve my relationship goals of being desirable to all the cool goth rock dudes I wanted to date in NY was to go off and learn the art of relationships from a tribe of sex geeks. It's risible, in hindsight. But it was cute. I wish literally anyone besides me appreciated how goddamn adorably naive that was.

It's a pipe dream to imagine that creating an entire new language to communicate in that the people you're dating don't speak is actually going to create more intimacy. We created this language to help dispel shame in our partners, but so often we just end up inviting more shame, shame that they're not as good as we are at the thing we're both doing together.

And yeah, it's often a gendered shame, it's a shame that the mostly-heteronormative men I tend to date feel more strongly perhaps than persons of other orientations, because thanks to the toxic masculinity rampant in society, men are just expected to be better at almost everything. As the jokes go, it's hard enough for your stereotypical man to ask for directions in the car let alone admit that he is comparatively ill-equipped to talk about important relationship issues like emotional needs or sexual satisfaction. For what it's worth, I don't see the same struggles in the relationships of male sex educators (which, granted, doesn't mean they don't exist). The guru-disciple dynamic, while not necessarily the pinnacle of relationship health, is far more prevalent in examples where straight men get to be the gurus.

It's the unsolvable puzzle, because in order to talk about it, I'd need to talk about it, and in talking about it I'm stepping into that arena where I'm the expert and they're not. "Hi baby, I need to have a Difficult Conversation with you. What I'm afraid is going to happen is that you're going to feel shame and leave me. What I want to happen is that you'll appreciate how hard I'm trying to get things right because I just want to feel worthy of being loved. And the thing I'm afraid to say is, well, is it weird that you're dating a sex educator? I fear that having dedicated my life to the study of sex and relationship communication actually makes me a liability to you, because you have dedicated your life to other worthwhile pursuits and yet we are not in a constant situation where your skill sets are relevant the way that mine are when we are literally just talking to each other." I don't know. Maybe it's just me but I don't see that going over well.

The difficult conversation that happened in autumn with my last departed significant lover involved him telling me that he didn't want to be wrong all the time, even though the subject he didn't want to be wrong about in that conversation was my own self-reported feelings, and even though that meant that he was telling me I was wrong instead. I called up my bestie, dating coach Adam Lyons, to vent about how hurt and frustrated I felt and how unfair it all was, and he replied with both sympathy and tough love: "It's always easier for people to date us than it is for us to date them, even though we're the ones who have put the work into studying this. As experts we know more, because we've studied. Others aren't as informed. But since dating is about emotions and feelings, they're just as right to follow their feelings as we are to follow ours. Our knowing more actually means we have more responsibility with our actions, which invariably means taking the blame even when we know we shouldn't."

Like me, Adam comes from a background in pickup artistry, and for all the flak that much of PUA culture deservedly receives, I will give it credit in that it expects its targets to know absolutely nothing about relationships. If anything, pickup errs on the side of insulting the intelligence of the people it's trying to engage, which is why it condones so many made-up stories and silly canned routines. But even negging, the reviled PUA tactic of criticizing a target in order to disqualify oneself as a potential suitor, actually sounds pretty harmless in comparison to expecting them to play on expert level in a highly stigmatized and deeply personal field: the former is a superficial comment on something we perceive they're lacking, while the latter is a physical demonstration of what they already know they're lacking.

"Our skill set is supposed to be in meeting people where they are," Ashley said, "when in reality we're actually asking people to meet us where we already are, which has a pretty tough barrier to entry."

I think the education in the sex geek community is an amazing resource, if two people in a relationship are willing to learn it together, or if two people come together who already know it. When that happens, magic can take place, breakthroughs can happen, and years can pass by without a conflict that doesn't get resolved in a few sentences. My relationship with my girlfriend Ela Darling is like this. We'll be at two years next month, and we've had maybe two fights, both of which were resolved in under five text messages. (Disclaimer, as non-primaries, we interact far less often than most standard primary couples of two years, but it's still pretty impressive by any metric.) I feel ridiculously safe with her, which means we can just chill and enjoy each other without all the usual anxiety that happens in relationships where communication feels stunted or lacking in awareness.

But when it comes to new people in my life, I find myself asking Okay, what would a normal girl do in this situation? What is the best way to make this person feel at ease when the act of making someone feel at ease is in itself potentially disquieting? How do I make someone feel safe when it's my attempts at making them feel safe that are making them feel unsafe?

I tried so hard to be good at relating that I lost the ability to relate. It would be funny if it weren't so fucking sad.

I love our community, I love my friends, I love that I was able to call up Reid and have a Difficult Conversation about publishing this piece and that it ended in our telling each other how much we appreciate each other, I love the positive changes we make in the world and in people's relationships when we give them the skill set to navigate the treacherous waters of intimacy. But sex geeks, we need to get a little less exclusionary and remember that people are people too.

02/16/2016

This new year's I made a resolution to be more present with my friends.

The intermittent reinforcement pattern of a previous relationship had turned me into a pigeon in a Skinner box on a variable interval schedule repeatedly pressing buttons in the hopes of getting a fix (English translation: someone was coming around only when he damn well felt like it, and I was descending into obsession trying to turn that into something consistent), and that too often meant that I was turning my friends into human sounding boards to talk about people who weren't treating me well. When I realized what a fucking embarrassment I'd somehow allowed myself to turn into, I first forgave myself (literally operant conditioning is science, and I'm not going to blame myself entirely for the unsurprising effects someone's repeated abandonment had on me), and then I resolved to make a change and do better.

One of those things I've resolved to do better for my friends is to show genuine care and concern for how their lives are going, to not only actively listen when they tell me about their relationships, but also to make inquiries and be genuinely curious about them. I no longer vaguely listen to their stories and tune in to put my coach hat on when they ask my analysis (something which, to my credit, I'm both good at and unstingy with); I now also examine the stories they tell me by asking questions.

It's pretty amazing what you can learn from people when you're really paying attention. Not just "oh, I listened to an old lady at a bus stop today and she had a cool story and now I feel better about myself for making her feel good" kind of paying attention but actually zooming out and looking at the patterns you see around you. How much do you know about your friends and why they do what they do? How much do you know about the passions and fears that motivate them?

For example: childhood, as author Matt Haig has said, is the chorus that keeps repeating, and that chorus is mostly the subject of Neil Strauss's book The Truth, a life-changing relationship manifesto in the form of an Odyssean memoir that I truly believe, though I'm biased, could be the defining book of our generation. Neil talks frankly in the book about how his "emotionally incestuous" relationship with his overprotective mother affected both his choice of partners as well as his ability to show up for them, perpetuating a hellish avoidant/addict cycle where his lovers' acts of affection felt smothering to him and his need for space felt anxiety-inducing to his lovers. I couldn't unsee that fucking book. I read it in October on the plane to Iceland for a shoot and I fear that the puzzlement of emotional landscapes it brought up in me may have actually caused me to be rudely withdrawn from the kind designer and photographer who'd hired me for the trip. I couldn't assimilate the information in that book and also continue living in the Skinner Box my ersatz lover was keeping me in, even though he'd just shown up again, and we'd just had one of the most beautiful evenings together at a spa in New York that had been a dream of mine to take him to since day one, and I had been so convinced that I could turn this thing around this time. (Sure enough, he ghosted me again shortly afterward, and that time my decision was easy. Well, easy isn't the right word, but it was clear.)

I've long come to terms with my imperfect childhood and made the necessary separations from the harmful relationships therein, but I had always held deeply to the belief that my awareness of the wrong that was done to me somehow exempted me from having its effects play out in my adult life. In the week-long retreat Neil held that was part of his research for the book (the deleted love commune chapter that you can get online if you buy the book), we presented our childhood timelines and mine was done so with detached rationality and even a peaceful superiority -- I've always known this wasn't right. I've come to terms with all this. I've done this work. This is nothing new about myself.

Neil called me on it, actually. "No wonder you feel you need pickup if your dad kept instilling the belief in you that you're worthless," he told me. "Arden, you're more hardcore about seduction than I am. But you don't need it. You're good enough just as you are."

"I have empirical data that state otherwise," I replied stoically. (I was a virgin til I was 22 and discovered pickup shortly after, and credited it with all my further love life success.)

The thing is, I realized just now that maybe it wasn't my not being good enough without pickup that was actually keeping me romantically starved until that point -- maybe it was actually me unconsciously insisting on reinforcing the worldview that my dad had instilled in me.

Looking back, it's true that the guys I was interested in weren't interested in me. But it's also possibly true that I was interested in those guys because they helped keep my world intact, a world in which the men in my life, all modeled after my dad, felt that I was worthless. I remember friendzoning a guy in my acting school in favor of a long-distance crush I was obsessed with, and only when he was about to leave NYU for a year to study abroad did I suddenly "realize" I'd had feelings for him all along. How rom-com! How perfect! No, of course not! I could only feel for him when his leaving town meant a necessary rejection of me that reinforced my story! That is the opposite of perfect!

"Isn't that the way it always is?" one of my evolved-PUA friends said to me today when I texted him that story. "People only start appreciating you when you're gone!"

"NO!" I replied forcefully, "That's NOT the way it always is! There are actually plenty of healthy partners out there who show up for each other all the time, but we're not seeing them, because that's the way we think it always is!" I made a list of healthy couples I know personally. Hang out with these people more, I told myself. Let their worldviews rub off on you.

The Baader-Meinhof effect is what happens when you see something and start to notice it everywhere -- buy a blue Honda, and you'll see nothing but blue Hondas on the road. The relationship equivalent of this is that if your mom or dad treated you like crap, you'll see nothing but people who treat you like crap. So, in keeping with the metaphor, if the blue Honda is your relationship model, you need to buy a new car. All of a sudden you're in your red Lexus seeing nothing but red Lexuses (Lexi?) on the road. You need to reprogram your definition of what it means to love and be loved.

In being more present with my friends and listening to their stories, I realized that even really smart, really talented, really amazing people can have some really fucked up views about what love is. I find myself listening to their relationship complaints and in examining them, I've started asking, "Ok, so what is it that makes you feel that this situation is somehow more appealing than literally anything else?" And to a one their response to that question is always to start making excuses for their lovers. I then counter by repeating all the excuses I'd made for my ex-lover just months earlier. And then we look at each other and realize that shit got real.

I want my friends to be happy, just as I want to be happy, but I also know that giving unsolicited counsel is usually shitty, so I check in and ask if they want my hot takes or not and I also fully support their right to make their own adult decisions. I've also asked some of my friends to respect it when I tell them I'm not ready to hear about their own romantic compulsions, the same way that a newly sober person needs to refrain from hanging around alcohol for a while until their sobriety feels more effortless. "[Redacted] showed up again," a girl friend texted me this weekend. I replied, "You know what? I want so much to support you as a friend, but I can't in good conscience celebrate this with you. I don't want you to get sucked back into another pain cycle, by which I mean that I actually don't want to get sucked back into another pain cycle, and I'm not far enough away yet to be sure that I won't, so this feels like dangerous information to me. I'm sorry. I hope whatever happens that it makes you happy."

I'm starting to worry a little bit that reprogramming my idea of love into a healthier model is going to require sacrificing not only the people I dated who perpetuated my toxic narrative, but also some of the amazing, generous, loving, talented, supportive friends I have who subscribe to the same worldview. It's not enough to axe the emotionally unavailable avoidants from my life; I might have to gently winnow the beautifully over-loving addicts who enable me to keep giving and giving when I'm getting nothing in return because this is just our normal, because our parents all, in different ways, made us feel we were worthless.

"If we don't get our shit together soon," I finally cried to my evolved-PUA friend, "we're going to spend our entire relationships talking about them to each other in the DMs!" "Damn Arden," he wrote back, "WHY'D YOU HAVE TO GO AND DROP A TRUTH BOMB LIKE THAT!!"

In The Matrix, when Neo takes the red pill and realizes that his whole life has been an illusion and that he's actually living in an impoverished dystopian hellhole, he freaks out so hard that he vomits. Writes Adyashanti, "Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."

Enlightenment is a misnomer. Enlightenment is heavy as fuck. (It's also highly ironic that the deeply misogynist Red Pill PUA community refers to itself as such, because in trading their views of women as sex-gatekeepers on pedestals for their views of women as hypergamous money-grubbing hoes, they've actually just traded one blue pill for another blue pill. A lie for a lie.)

There's a lot that is really lovely about knowingly, willingly living in a fantasy world, especially when you can craft a beautiful one to your liking and invite potential lovers into it with you, and also especially when it fuels your art -- and lord knows some of my best work has been born out of one-sided relationships that I was having in my head with someone who wasn't showing up for me, because whether positive or negative if I'm not being allowed a conversation with that person you can be damn well sure I'll have it with my notebook, my band, my mic and my audience, or else with a camera and a photographer. But I can't let a fantasy world blind me to reality, no matter how seductive, and I don't want to believe that I can't be happy and also create interesting work. Sure, the passion of a love addict fuels my purest, most fiery creations, but if I start believing that I have to be in pain to be an artist that's just going to have some nasty ripple effects that I refuse to accept. And like, it's equally shitty when your art becomes a reminder of the lack of love you're receiving, when you literally spent money on a ticket to your former lover's movie when it opened and yet he never once came to see your band play or bought your songs on iTunes, nor even uploaded the CD you gave him, because "rock isn't his thing." Ok, but supporting the art of people I care about is my thing, so.

When you can be more honest with a camera than a person. Photo by Nadya Lev.

Remember what I said in my last entry about beginning the year anew and doing my damnedest to get better? No one ever tells you how much healing hurts. No one ever tells you it's not about receiving new happy butterfly beliefs that immediately make you feel brand new, that it's about letting go of your favorite fucking fairytales that maybe literally saved your life when you were a kid. It feels like losing your home. To heal is to grieve.

In vowing to be more present with my friends, I've also started realizing who my friends actually are. In her interview with me on her Observations podcast, my friend Sovereign suggests comparing your dating life to doing your taxes as a freelancer and seeing each year which people actually hired you and contributed to your income. In looking at it, it's pretty amazing how many musicians I've dated and yet how the people who invited me to go to the Grammys with them were friends of mine who are a couple about to have a baby. It's amazing how much I have chosen to date people who have shown less care for me than people I'm not dating, especially when you consider how much, for me, dating someone (and all the sex, art, dinners, and experience curation that I put into that) is an intentional way of showing them care.

The Grammys yesterday with cool artists who are nice to me, check out Nic Nassuet and his music.

I invited my evolved-PUA friend today to commit to solving our similar issues and he said yes, so here's what we're doing: In addition to making a list of happy couples (or triples, or non-monogamous intimate partnerings of any variety) and spending more time around them so that I can slowly trade my shitty blue Honda in for the red Lexuses they've been driving around, I also vowed to make a list over the next week of anytime someone shows up for me -- which could mean inviting me out, spending time with me, giving a gift, supporting my art, promoting my work, buying me a drink, cooking a meal, fucking me in a way that conscientiously takes my desires into consideration, creating art with me, holding space for me to talk about whatever's on my mind, giving a sincere acknowledgment, sending a welcomed sext, listening to my music, or anything really that is designed to make me feel good and not just appeal to their own agenda -- and then at the end of the week to look at that list and see which names come up and which ones are conspicuously absent. (I'm doing that this week. Want to curry favor with me? Now's the time.)

Last night at the Grammys, Our Lady of Perpetual Red Lipstick Taylor Swift became the first woman to win Album of the Year twice. And in her acceptance speech, she said, "I want to say to young women: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame, but if you focus on your work and don't let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you're going, you'll look around and you'll know it was you and the people that love you that put you there."

Hearing Taylor say that live in real time was like being hit in the chest, even sitting in the upper mezzanine. Being loved is not the same thing as being sporadically wanted when it's convenient for someone. Being wanted feels so good but it's not at all the same thing as being supported. There's a saying in pickup that the measure of a PUA's sincerity is whether they spend time on you, and I would add to that that it's not only time spent but quality time spent, time in which the two of you are engaging each other in ways that make both of you feel good. Are you choosing people who love you, who support you? And if not, why? What is it that you think love is? Why is that situation preferable to literally anything else you could be doing?

Break your illusions, babies. Start loving the people who show up. (Or until you can, at least enjoy the art.)

01/06/2016

Ok let me start out by saying that I don't want to write this post. It's 2016, it's a new year, I kissed a really cute and smart and charming boy at midnight on New Year's Eve, and I have been working really, really hard to put the pain of last year behind me, and for the most part I have made a great deal of progress. The last thing I want to do is get sucked back into that pain, both for my own sake as well as for the sake of people both new and old that I'm inviting into my life. Nor do I want to keep writing these posts that highlight the disempowerment I've been feeling, because it's just not a fun feeling to dwell on.

Unfortunately, there's social media.

This morning, two posts appeared in my Twitter feed consecutively. The first was this one, about the tendency of self-identified submissive women to have a history of abusive relationships. I've touched on that concept in this post about emotional labor (the submissive woman's desire to give it and the narcissist's desire to take it), but here are the parts from today that struck me, edited together for brevity:

[Submissive women] are motivated by a deep desire to please. Every submissive woman I have ever personally known has been through a number of abusive relationships. She gives and men take and take and it becomes abusive. Weak men with self-esteem issues are often drawn to these women, which compounds the problem. It takes enormous strength and experience to take from a woman like this (which is what she needs) without abusing her. Your job is to soak up all her love and affection and attention, help her find ways to please you, while supporting and strengthening her as a person. In a relationship like this, trust is the one thing that cannot be repaired. If you damage it, you now go into the same pile of “men who hurt her” and you will never truly be trusted again.

At this point in my blog I don't think I have to repeat the specifics of my past relationship with a Dominant with a mind control fetish (if you're a newcomer, you can read here and here to bring yourself up to speed), but suffice it to say I have noticed myself feeling more than a little Jessica Jonesy around my kink lately. I feel like when I get into a submissive headspace it's possible for me to lose a lot of my good judgment, because part of what it means to submit is to suspend judgment, which allows for surrender. But I'm feeling like oh god, if I'm mind controlled again I might do things that are counter to my best interests. And I worry that if I just choose self-preservation I'll miss out on my erotic bliss, which is my favorite thing and without which life feels bleak. But I've noticed several instances in the past few months where my surrender seems anchored to an anxiety trigger, and I'm not sure how to fix that.

I understand that there are a lot of self-protective coping mechanisms surrounding me, because it's hard to tell the kind of surrender that is transformative shamanic ordeal from the kind of surrender that is selling your soul to the devil, and once that oxytocin bond kicks in even the devil can look pretty appealing. Mostly I have to calculate which potential partners have a favorable risk/reward ratio in terms of my experiencing their dominance and then safeguard against anyone else who might be trying to exploit me, and in those defenses I end up looking less than submissive from the outside (at least on my social media anyway), and I start to worry about the way my submissive market value might appear to any potential dominant partners in my future who might google me. I'm not sure my skill at surrender comes across well when I keep talking about how much I have to protect it.

Suffice it to say, when you have a fetish for granting mindless obedience, you have to really know who you can trust with that shit. "You're addicted to surrender," one of my mentors admonished me recently. When you consider that idea, my kink becomes much more complicated. Back in early fall I was texting to try to meet up with a person with whom I had been in a fairly toxic spiral, and the friend who was with me as I waited on a response turned to me in the midst of my staring compulsively at my phone and said, "Have you ever hung out with an addict?"

To put this in perspective, while I feared Jessica Jones would be a wellspring of PTSD flashbacks for me, it turns out I actually felt a howling nostalgia for the singleminded passion of Kilgrave's victims. It felt similar to how I imagine Russell Brand felt describing the envy he felt toward his former addict self who still got to do heroin. The simplicity of obedience is such a goddamned relief to this overly analytical mind, even when (especially when?) that obedience requires so much self-sacrifice on my part that it ends up being indistinguishable from self-destruction.

I want to believe that such an alignment of my actions with another person's best interests is possible to do in a healthy manner with someone ethical, but you're really tempting Jesus in the desert with that one, aren't you?

Photo by Steve Prue

Back to Twitter: the second post that came up on my feed was this thread by @borderlinefemme, in which she analyzes the relationship of mental illness in women to both abuse and stigma. She cites a survey from Psychological Medicine which states that 40% of women with severe mental illnesses had suffered rape or attempted rape, as compared to 7% of the total female population, and then goes on to describe the villainization of women with borderline personality disorder (BPD) as "either femmes fatales, harpies, or unstable emotional bitches" -- basically, imperfect victims. And when you remember that one of the symptoms of BPD is an intense fear of abandonment, that means that many women with BPD will learn to go to extreme efforts to avoid becoming the emotional caricature of their disorder that would cause people to leave them:

borderline women aren't allowed to be angry. our angry is too scary, it's too hurtful, it's too much. bc borderline woman are expected to get angry, we're now trying to repress it. so i like i assume many others have just shut it down. if i allow myself to show off my anger, people will leave almost immediately. there's no chance at redemption. so i get sad instead. now we've replaced anger with sadness. and that sadness may be incredibly annoying and redundant but it's more acceptable than a mad woman. and who is easy to abuse? the sad girl. the girl is bottling it all in and submitting to the apathy that is expected. ~try to be chill~ bc again, that sadness may cause friends/lovers to become irritated but not enough to leave & despite the abuse we dont want to be abandoned. once you've seen a woman with a disorders madness, can you ever perceive her as nice or even stable again? borderline women are paying the price for this. our relationships, health, perception of self. anger is not a privilege we are entitled to.

I don't know if I ever suffered from BPD. It's hard to tell personality disorders from trauma reactions, just as it's hard to tell learning secure attachment patterns from absorbing the culture of chill, just as it's hard to tell depression from being surrounded by assholes. When in the midst of a depressive episode in 2011 I went to a clinic to speak to team of psychological evaluators, I ran through a list of BPD symptoms and explained how it could be an "intense fear of abandonment" that caused me to become a seduction coach and which might also account for my submissive orientation since there is a security that comes in being told exactly what to do in order to be pleasing to one's partner, and suggested since my book had just come out that perhaps I had managed to build an entire career on the backs of my demons. The doctors just stared at me like I was from another planet, and eventually the episode passed and I just got on with my life.

I will, however, say this much: I don't feel I have ever been allowed to express anger in a relationship. In my aforementioned D/s relationship in my early 20s, my partner shamed me for expressing anger and retreated from any issue I got emotional about. When we got our neuro-linguistic programming certifications, I learned the NLP tenet "The meaning of your communication is the response that you get," and started taking responsibility for how my words were landing. And since I was dating a selfish Dominant, the best way to get my needs met was to please him and hope for an intermittent reward.

This habit of allowing anger to squeeze out only in the calmest, most rational and even-toned sentences has stayed with me ever since. Even in the wake of my breakup at the beginning of 2015, which was so sudden and without warning that I really should have been given plenty of space to rage and process, I sent my former lover a text message a day later expressing something that was angering me, and he accused me of "haranguing." So I stopped texting and dropped the subject. Better to swallow my anger in silence than to be branded an overemotional harpy. (Oh silence. I could write an entire post on the nature of silence, and maybe one day I will. In short, to express anger is often to make a request that can be ruthlessly denied, and to make a request so important it comes out as anger only to have it denied by your loved one is a risk too painful to bear.)

So how do these two posts relate, and why did seeing them on Twitter consecutively send me into an emotional tizzy today?

Well, as I wrote about a few months ago, kink often gets conflated (sometimes accurately, sometimes not) with trauma and abuse history, which can also be a cause of mental illness such as PTSD. In some cases, BDSM relationships can even attract abusers under the guise of dominance as sanctioned abuse, and even cause PTSD, Jessica Jones-style. But to take that a step further, according to the Handbook of Gender Research in Psychology, when presented with identical patient symptoms, doctors will more often diagnose men with PTSD and women with BPD. (Seriously read that link, it's fucked up.) Translation? Men experience pain from trauma in their lives, but bitches be crazy.

Synthesizing all the information above draws the conclusion that women who identify as submissive are more likely to attract abusers, more likely to be gaslighted for reacting to abuse, more likely to be stigmatized for talking about abuse, and more likely to be punished and ostracized for being angry about it. Because kinky women are too often assumed to be mentally ill, and a mentally ill woman expressing anger is a short fuse away from boiling your bunny.

Sometimes I feel like fighting for my submission is an uphill battle (seriously how hard should it be to want to please someone?), and slut shame is only a very small part of my adversary. Sometimes I feel like I am sacrificing my own emotional life just to be low-maintenance, because being low-maintenance is a desirable quality in a submissive, and I so wish to be a desirable submissive.

I'd like to say that the right partner will honor my emotions when I express them in a clear and rational manner, and in fact will reward my carefully cultivated communication skills by listening to me and taking me seriously. But the truth is even my fellow relationship coaching colleagues sometimes have trouble believing in the insecurities I talk about because I have spent so much time cultivating ease and attractiveness, and because I speak about my issues with such a detached rationality. Like, isn't it weird that the more transparent you try to be about your vulnerabilities, the more people think you're brave? The other night I was hanging out in a hot tub with my friend Destin, who's a tantric energy worker, and he did some light energy movement on me. "Wow," he said when we were through, "you have a lot more going on in your root chakra than I thought." "Oh?" I asked. "Yeah, that's where issues about self-worth, right to existence, and trust all happen." I looked at him and said, "That's what I've been trying to tell everyone but nobody believes me!"

I am having some issues with trust because I am a submissive, and because I wish to be a desirable submissive I'm having trouble expressing my issues with trust.

And trusting myself seems to defeat the point of surrender. The bliss of surrender comes from not having to make my own decisions, and there's a very fine line between surrendering to the unknown and not taking responsibility for fucking up your life. Luckily it's been a long time since my surrender caused me to fuck up my life (and even then at least I'm getting a good memoir out of it?), but I also haven't found many places where it feels worthwhile to surrender lately either.

I wish that everyone in the world possessed ethics, integrity, and trustworthiness -- I would just go around being submissive all the time. But in the meantime, I'd at least like a little more compassion for the emotions that I put into my service as well as the stuff that's going to naturally come up in the course of a relationship. Because even the best of people will hurt you unintentionally, and I need to feel that my pain/trauma will be acknowledged if I bring it up without it meaning that I'm crazy, irrational, or "haranguing" in the way that women, particularly kinky women, are unfairly labeled.

11/16/2015

I spent this past week at Monique Darling's Transformative Intensive for Extraordinary Facilitators where I had the pleasure of being one of the educators in her impressive lineup. I asked if I could attend on some of the other days when I wasn't teaching so I could watch my colleagues' presentations, and then, as often happens during these events, I had a breakthrough, a moment I couldn't unsee, a question I couldn't unask.

Monique was performing a vulva massage on another educator who is a certified sexologist. In tantra teachings, our chakras, in addition to existing along the planes of our bodies, also exist fully within our genitals, so genital massage combined with breath work and intention can be a way of unblocking fear, shame, identity issues, etc. As Monique began penetrating with her fingers, the person on the receiving end said, "You're gonna find some issues coming up around 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock."

For all the education I have put myself through in service to my calling (NLP, hypnosis, NVC, timeline therapy, tantra, reiki), sexology is a field into which I have not delved. Confession? I really don't understand the inner workings of my vagina; sex is so much about narrative and intention for me that it's never really been something I've felt called to learn more about. So when I heard this educator I admire talking about exactly where in their vagina their emotions were being held, I thought to myself, "Wow, that's incredible! That's a whole language I haven't learned yet! Here's an awesome new thing I could potentially geek out on!"

And then another voice popped up immediately: No. No more esoteric languages. You already feel alone enough in this world.

It was the first time in my life that the idea of learning something new was met by my brain with fear. (Maybe if Monique's fingers had been in my vagina I could have worked through it.) Sure, I have sometimes met the idea of learning some things with apathy or disinterest, but never had I had such a strong dopamine response get shut down so quickly by my amygdala. Nope. No more learning. Danger ahead.

Monique took time for questions after the demo. I waited until the room was quiet, because I didn't want to make her demo all about me and my stupid fears. But when ultimately I shared my reaction, several other women nodded and raised their hands in solidarity.

"Yeah," one woman echoed, "what's the point of stepping into our divine empowered consciousness if nobody else can meet us there and we just keep losing everyone?"

It's weird being a dating coach and dating people who are not dating coaches. I imagine it's equally weird for them dating me. I don't expect people to play on my level; that would be unrealistic, given the literal thousands of hours I have dedicated to learning intimate relating. But I do share the things I learn, in the same way that any nerd is apt to get excited over the subject material of their specific geekery. Only it's a little different sharing, say, your favorite tv shows with the person you're in a relationship with than it is sharing how to be in a relationship with the person you're in a relationship with.

In my ideal vision this is not a conflict; in my ideal vision my font of wisdom is a resource I make available to my partner in an expression of service submission. I use the things I know to serve their needs to the best of my ability, I use my communication skills to ask for the things I need in return, and if they come to me with a conflict, then I help to facilitate around it and solve it in a manner that pleases them -- not by imposing my will because I know better, but by offering them whatever resources I have that will lead to a solution that makes everyone happy. (And honestly for as many men as are obsessed with the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, you would think this would not be a difficult sell.)

The last man I dated with any significant investment finally articulated to me, perhaps a bit too late, that one of the struggles he is overcoming in the wake of the decades-long relationship he was in prior to me is the fight for self-autonomy; in his previous bout with relating, he was constantly told he was wrong and forced to abnegate himself from decisions. I realized then that in offering my resources to him in what I felt was an act of care and generosity, I was unwittingly triggering him. Unfortunately, as often happens to us when we are in the process of breaking through things, his pendulum swung a bit too far in the other direction, and he began telling me I was wrong about my own feelings and forcing me to abnegate myself from decisions about the relationship by making them without involving me. (Projection is awesome! Hearts are broken more easily than cycles!) And if in that moment I had pointed out to him what he was doing, I would have, in the very act of conveying my informed take on the situation, been threatening the very self-autonomy he was seeking.

Sometimes compassion is just about shutting the fuck up.

"You date a lot of really smart, really successful people," my friend Conner said to me not long ago. "I don't know them personally. But they're probably used to being the smartest person in the room. And then they meet you. And you're maybe not smarter than they are overall, but you're smart in the one area that they likely aren't, the area in which they have to relate to you. In some ways, it must make them feel like they've found their missing piece. And in other ways it must make them feel very resentful. And humiliated."

It would be easy for those who don't know me to imagine that I'm a controlling know-it-all in relationships, but that idea leaves out the fact that I'm a service-oriented submissive coping with an anxious attachment style. So I'm more likely to ask someone "What can I do better? What do you like that I'm missing? What would you like this to look like?" than I am to try to dictate things or force my way. The trouble is, even asking those questions can accidentally put me in the role of facilitator, especially when those questions aren't something that a partner is prepared to ask in return, or even to be able to answer.

I'm just trying my best to do everything right in an arena where things tend to be naturally messy and intimate and explosive, and I would like some fucking compassion for once. The idea of "doing everything right" in relationship is mad folly to the point of hilarity, but I would like to be appreciated for how sincerely I fucking try. I would like that to be counted in the plus column, not the you-bring-out-my-insecurities minus column.

I remember the first time I met Cristo D'Arcy, an intuitive healer invited by mutual friend Neil Strauss to work with us at a week-long retreat that was part of his research for The Truth. Cristo read everyone in the group accurately, down to naming high school sports injuries, and the group was amazed. We were all on the porch drinking and laughing and balking and asking to be healed. When it got quiet, I asked him if I could ask a personal question and he agreed. "Do you ever get lonely?" I asked. He looked at me for a long moment. "You know, no one's ever asked me that before."

Esoteric attraction coach Elizabeth Egan Everett warned me very quickly upon my move to LA that the path to consciousness is a dangerous and lonely one, not named The Perilous Path for nothing. But I was stubborn, unmovable. I wanted gnosis. The more I learn about attraction, intimacy, relationship, and sexuality, the more isolated I feel. I am intensely, eternally grateful for my friends in sexuality/spirituality who share this language with me, and in times like this I surround myself with them for connection and self-care, but I also think the idea that sexuality educators can only date other sexuality educators is akin to saying that chefs should only have dinner with other chefs.

I got into studying the art of seduction because I was, romantically speaking, the runt of the litter. I just wanted a normal relationship like everyone else was having. But somewhere along the line I bypassed that point.

I made some very difficult decisions recently; quiet, personal decisions; decisions that go gentle into that good night. I cannot be intimate with people with whom my only safe choice is to keep my goddamn mouth shut, because that isn't intimacy. I have to be able to bring my whole self to the table, and that self happens to include years of thought, resources, and opinions. I don't need those opinions to be anything other than what they are -- opinions -- but I need to be afforded the simple human right of self-expression. Sure, not every acquaintance needs my latest hot take, but with an intimate partner, I mean, isn't the whole point of intimacy having a safe space to say the stuff I think about?

I have an opportunity now with someone presently on my radar, and that opportunity is a forked path: on the one hand I can censor myself, act the way I imagine a normal girl acts, be generically pretty and pleasant but tone down the weird; on the other hand I can be me and do the crazy grand shit that I do, the stuff that will either lose me someone entirely cuz I'm a fuckin' weirdo or firmly seal me in their heart for the exact same reason.

Maybe if I cared about the outcome of things more than I enjoy the process of following my dopamine it'd be different. Maybe I'd be scared, play it safer, think who the fuck do I think I am, hold back. But this is my art. I'd be depriving myself of my own creativity if I chose not to do the things that I love in the sincere attempt to bring someone -- and myself -- pleasure. So when someone I want to fuck asks me to send video, it's just way more interesting to me to make art porn than just switch on a webcam. That's probably weird, but it's me. And it's better to know sooner rather than later whether someone's into that or not. (On the plus side, I also learned how to edit video, so, there's that.)

As I've said before, it is better to be available to the right person than in a relationship with the wrong one, and as a primary-oriented non-monogamist, I only need one person to get me, appreciate me, and love me for who I am (with the option for more should they show up). I could easily have a thousand people love me for who I am not. I could easily have a guy shove a ring on my finger and then start cheating on me five years in because no one taught him how to relate, because relationships are seen these days as an end state rather than a journey or an art form. I don't want that.

Earlier this week, I balked in fear at the idea of learning something new, because learning felt unsafe. That's not cool. I didn't recognize myself in that moment. I'm undoing that now. I'm done apologizing for myself, belittling myself, and feeling that my sincere desire to cultivate pleasure with a person I love somehow makes me a liability. That's easier to write than it is to do, but here I am, and it's a start.

09/14/2015

"What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?" - Jacques Lacan

"She gave it all. You gave her shit. She could've done just anything." - Banks, Goddess

My last few posts have been pretty somber. It's been a pretty somber several months, socioculturally. Today I'm going to focus on something more positive, but be warned, it's going to take a bit to get there (so, TW for those of you who find that helpful).

Transmutation is defined as "the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form." It's also used historically when discussing alchemy, the process of changing base metals into gold.

One of the many stigmatizations that BDSM practitioners face is the assumption that we were abused as children, thus arising our kinks for either giving or receiving control or sadism. (Christian Grey's history of abuse is one example -- he may be fictional, but the author who wrote him is sadly not.) This is then used to point to kinky people as damaged, broken, or shameful. You wouldn't be into this if you were normal, is the usual finger-pointing cry, completely ignoring the notion that assigning the word normal to just about anything in humanity is a risibly futile endeavor. We kink practitioners are supposed to respond to this with a defense of ourselves as healthy, perfectly well-adjusted individuals -- and in many cases science says we'd be right -- but this is actually not quite the right response, as by distancing ourselves from abuse victims we are implying that they are damaged, broken, and shameful, the very things we're trying to prove ourselves not to be.

In my case, I was a victim of abuse growing up. The abuse I suffered wasn't physical in nature, at least not in the way we typically think of physical abuse. I was never hit, which I found endlessly frustrating, as at least a few bruises or a black eye might have been proof enough for the authorities to take my claims seriously and remove me from the abusive situation, which was my father's household following my parents' divorce. Read that again: the emotional and psychological abuse I suffered was so bad I prayed my father would hit me so that someone would believe me and get me out of there.

My father's abuse generally consisted of trapping me in a relatively enclosed space with him (like my room or his car) and yelling at my for up to four or five hours about how worthless and damaged I was. I knew his behavior was wrong, and my mother, who suffered similarly when they were together and whose life he tried to take on the day she left him, knew it was wrong too. The trouble was that the family court systems in the mid-to-late 90s didn't seem to know it was wrong. At their divorce, I was assigned a custody schedule putting me at my father's house (where I no longer had my mother to step in and protect me) every other weekend and sometimes for over a week on holiday vacations. As a young child I was too frightened to speak up to the courts in front of my father about his behavior, but my mom reassured me that when I was ready to speak, she would support me and sue for full custody.

I was ready at fourteen years old. During fall of my freshman year of high school, I wrote a letter to my father calmly explaining to him why I never wanted to see him again in my life, and my mom called her lawyer. Somehow I had a naive fantasy that this would be the hardest part: just speak up, just face the demon, a moment of extreme courage and then you'll be done. Then they will listen, they'll save you, they'll protect you from his rage.

It was another ten months before our case even reached court, which made visiting my father every other weekend after writing that letter extremely awkward (and by awkward I mean terrifying). And when it did, the judge (who was female, which somehow makes this story worse), retained the exact same custody schedule, calling me a hothouse violet and telling me that if I couldn't handle my father's behavior then I would never make it in New York as an actress.

Emboldened by my defeat, my father grew worse in his abuse. My mom and her lawyer, wanting me not to be hurt, responded by telling me, "Just block it out. It's just words. Just block it out."

So I blocked it out. Words were just sensation, jumbles of sounds forming, neither inherently good nor bad when devoid of context. This isn't happening. I am not here right now.

This is how I cultivated the ability to dissociate.

The year I turned eighteen, I moved to New York to go to NYU and that fall I saw my first concert, my favorite band playing Hammerstein Ballroom. I got there early and stood front and center at the barricade through all the opening bands so that I could have a prime spot to be closest to the lead singer, on whom I had my first rock idol crush. At some point during their set, a girl next to me tried to edge in at the barricade and take the spot I'd patiently claimed, but I held on dearly. She then reached under my arm and grabbed the skin on my inner forearm and twisted it, hard. "Move! You fuckin' tool!" she screamed. And then I remembered: I could block it out. Pain, like words, is just sensation. Sensation devoid of context is neither inherently good nor bad. I stayed there and remained stoic as she pinched me as hard as she could, and after a bit, she backed off, spooked.

The next morning I went to class exhausted and with a huge bruise on my inner arm, but I was proud. I had stood my ground, and sure enough, my singer crush had come right up to me at the barricade when the band sang their hit single. I had a bruise I was proud of.

It would be another four years before I'd start to explore the BDSM scene, before I'd even lose my virginity, but when I did find BDSM, it made almost everything in my life make sense -- fantasies I'd had since I was five years old, strangely subservient ways I'd behaved with crushes. When my first kink-oriented lover introduced me to sadomasochism, I wanted to endure the pain he was giving me, to push through it for both the sake of his pleasure and for my own curiosity. To do so, I used my ability to dissociate.

Photo by Brian Richards

A recent play partner told me he felt there were two reasons he believed people were attracted to pain: "One, to get through it in order to feel the good sensations on the other side; and two, to use it in the moment to focus their minds in the present." (Quick biology lesson: the pain from consensual sadomasochism releases endorphins that result in a kind of state of pain-free euphoria and redirects blood flow in the brain in such a way that a feeling of oneness and calm is produced, not unlike that of yoga, meditation, or shamanic ritual, and from personal experience, I can attest that it is highly pleasurable.)

"Well, I think there's a third reason," I told him. "For me, enduring pain is a skill set. It means increased permission to my partners when I can take more. It means I can let them do what they want. So it's an act of service."

When I decided to friend-stalk Conner Habib, a writer and sex work rights activist I much admire, I went to see him give a local talk on sex and the body where the subject of dissociation came up.

"Dissociation is actually incredibly generous when you think about it," Conner said. "When you dissociate, you go outside yourself. And being outside your self is the only way you can truly see another person. So dissociation is the root of empathy."

There is a great deal that I enjoy about BDSM selfishly, plenty of fantasies I have regarding it on my own where there is no other person present to give me his or her approval, so it is not just something I suffer for the sake of pleasing someone else, which would be toxic. But my greatest asset as a lover is my ability to give permission; the greatest gift I am able to give a lover is the carte blanche to do whatever he wants with me when I so choose.

We live in a society that puts a great deal of sexual shame on us, both male and female, and as we have seen in light of current events (and which as a pro-domme I witnessed personally for years), our current culture is rife with couples suffering from rifts in their intimacy because they are unable to communicate their desires to one another, because they fear that they're shameful. I don't ever want a relationship where my partner feels they have to hide something from me and confess it to a stranger they're hiring or chatting to on the internet in secret. I'm greedy that way -- I want the deepest, most thorough intimacy I can get with someone, and that means embracing both their light and their dark, every part of them, regardless of whoever made them feel it was wrong to want things, regardless of their shame. And my greatest gift is my ability to create a safe space where any desire can be discussed and virtually any act that doesn't result in damage requiring professional repair can be done to me by my partner in the name of healing that shame. And the reason I can do that for them is because I possess the capacity to endure, because I am able to dissociate, because my father abused me.

What do you think you're proving when you tell me that my sexuality stems from abuse? That consensual sadomasochism is bad, because it has its roots in trauma? First of all, statistically, you're wrong, as BDSM practitioners are no more likely to have been abuse victims than vanilla people -- but what if you were right?

If you were right that my abuse was the source of my sexuality, then what happened was that I was able to take a curse that was put on me as a child and turn it into a gift that I can give to someone I care about for the purpose of their healing. This is why I can look at my bruises the next morning and be proud of them: because I took the worst thing that happened to me and I turned it into the greatest gift I can give to someone I love. That's alchemy. That's transmutation.

That's giving someone the universe.

Personally, I can't think of a better possible outcome.

The post-50 Shades movement to separate kink from trauma in order to depathologize it is a well-intentioned one, but it's problematic too, in that we are still telling abuse victims there is something wrong with them for having been abused. No kinky person should have to feel shame for being assumed to be an abuse victim, but no abuse victim should have to feel shame for being kinky.

08/22/2015

"Next time you wanna talk trash, Imma put it on blast." - Karmin, I Told You So

I'm going to keep this brief because I just put up a new post last night and there is a lot that's getting me down this weekend that I'm trying not to dwell on for the sake of retaining my ability to function. But I can't help pointing out that I've seen a lot of thinkpieces this week on the Ashley Madison hack -- 37m users on a website designed for extramarital affairs had their personal information outed -- about how we shouldn't take glee in what was an illegal breach of privacy, even if the people who were breached were cheaters. And I have an unpopular opinion.

I have no desire to look at the data dump and I don't believe in bullying individuals. But if you want me to feel bad for the victims... I don't.

It's admittedly a self-interested position. Much of what it comes down to is that I feel more threatened by the institution of marriage than I do by information surveillance. Neither of these things are good things, but if you were to ask me which has caused me more pain in my life, it is our culture's sex-negativity and false fetishization of monogamy. (N.B.: I respect monogamy as a conscious, fully examined relationship choice. I do not respect it as a societal relationship default from which any dissenters are considered deviant, damnable, or "edgy," or even "interesting to talk to at cocktail parties.")

Being on the forefront of a polarizing sexual revolution and trying to do work that releases people's shame has too often made me a pariah, because I make public about myself what most people keep secret. I do this so that people everywhere can feel less alone in their sexualities and have access to resources that will help them to express those sexualities in a healthy and positive manner.

In my twenties I spent four years as a professional dominatrix, and I saw countless men come to the commercial dungeon where I worked in order to get needs met that they were too ashamed to talk about with their committed partners. It gave me a great deal of empathy and compassion for them, and ultimately, even if I hadn't been forced out of the profession by being outed (first by the New York Post with a photo of me and a story about my raising the legal fees for my boss/boyfriend's arrest, and then by competitors in my industry with my legal name and session location), I wouldn't have been able to continue in it forever due to the toxicity of all the dishonest relationships I saw within it. The natural next step for me was to take what I'd learned and try to help people actually form satisfying relationships that meet their needs. I literally wrote a chapter in my book advising women on how to get their partners to open up about their more secretive sexual fantasies so that everyone can have more functional relationships without damaging rifts in intimacy.

I know how important my work is and how many people I've helped, because many of them have come forward and told me so, usually privately over email. But by putting myself at the forefront of releasing sexual shame, I've made myself into a lightning rod for people's own internal conflict around their desires. I've become a sacrificial goat in the Madonna/whore complex, a woman whose entire personhood becomes tarnished because she dares to speak frankly about sex -- the kind of sex that everybody else seems to want but refuses to talk about.

These same people who have felt the need to either repress or explore their desires dishonestly are the people who in public have willingly, intentionally, perpetuated a cultural system that villainizes me for doing work that seeks to give them resources to heal. These people have caused me a great deal of pain.

Sorry not sorry.

Now maybe you're saying, But Arden, not everyone is as brave as you are.

Well FUCK THEM. I'm tired of all the bravery falling on me. I'm tired of having to suffer as a result of everyone else's cowardice.

So, I'm sorry if I don't feel bad for the people who have been judging me all along for being honest about the same things they've been hiding. I was here the whole time -- I've been here all along, offering help and counsel, pleading with people to get right with themselves, and now a day of reckoning has come.

I'm not cackling with glee, mind you. The Cassandra curse is a cold comfort. I'm just sitting here chilling out on the vapors of Delphi, shrugging, I tried to warn y'all, but you didn't listen.

Many of you might have witnessed the recent Twitter meltdown of user @benschoen (purposefully not linked), who was outed as having stalked and harassed Buzzfeed writer @GraceSpelman for politely rejecting his advances after sending her a creepy Facebook message. (If you haven't, you can read The Daily Dot's summary of it here.) In a nutshell, Schoen wrote to Grace, having never met her, informing her that based on her online presence he thought she might be "the one" and casually proposed marriage. Spelman politely informed him that she had a boyfriend, and then blocked him, after which he proceeded to stalk her via email and Twitter and then to melt down completely and threaten suicide on Twitter over the past several days as his transgressions were brought to light.

This isn't an uncommon occurrence, sadly. I've been email-harassed and even approached on the street not far from my home by a man whose unwelcome Facebook advances I'd blocked. Several other women have come forward about being harassed by Schoen himself, but before you #notallmen me, it's clear he's not the only one.

Okay. I get that rejection is unpleasant. I get that it's upsetting, I get that it can sometimes feel like someone is ripping your entrails out and tossing them on the floor like lengths of just-used rope. I understand the panic attacks, the threatened sense of identity, the feeling of an infinite weight pressing down on your chest when you wake up in the morning and whenever you remember how that loss felt. Let's remember that up until my early 20s, I was a sexually and romantically frustrated virgin whom nobody wanted. And as I've written about before, I have an anxious attachment style. That means that having the security of a partner's presence taken away from me literally sends me into panic attacks and mental health relapses. I do just about everything in my power to avoid rejection as it literally compromises my health and, with it, my ability to function and provide for myself. So I get that rejection has the power to make fools of us all.

What I don't understand is why so many men feel that the best course of action is to respond to rejection by becoming exactly the kind of man that women wish to avoid.

In 2011 I put out a book called The New Rules Of Attraction: How To Get Him, Keep Him, and Make Him Beg For More (disclaimer: I've never liked the subtitle, it was my publisher's idea), which, as the title suggests, is a book about how to attract and seduce men. It's a loose curriculum that I compiled from time spent learning pickup artistry as well as time spent in the sex industry as a pro-domme, and I still stand by about 90% of what I wrote. (There are some things I'd rewrite if I could to allow for more nuance, more accurate expression of my ideas, and the fact that I've grown up a bit in the last four years, but overall I think it is a worthwhile text.) This is because my reaction to constant, repeated rejection up through my early twenties was to figure out how to become more attractive.

Truly, today, I am much more attractive than I was then, much wiser, and more desirable to other people. And yet what I've only realized rather recently is that being desirable to others is not in itself enough to make for fulfillment.

Last month I wrote about emotional labor and the tendency of women's oft-gendered skills of caretaking and nurturing to go unreciprocated by the men they partner with. The art of seduction, while it has its undeniable rewards, is performance of emotional labor. And seducing someone who is incapable of reciprocating that labor is exhausting.

Let's go down a quick list of skill sets that I consciously developed in order to be more attractive and better at relationships: first there's my physical appearance which I put concerted effort into, not only to appear attractive but to match my seductive brand to my desired demographic; then there's the art of conversation, including but not limited to cold approach art and cosmic tittage; active listening, of course; communication skills such as elucidating personal boundaries, both mine as well as others', and having difficult conversations productively; then there are the many years I spent in the BDSM community learning not only the physical skill sets of kink from both the dominant and submissive sides of the whip but also how to handle the sexual shame of people with stigmatized desires (i.e., ALL OF YOU); then there are the sexological classes I've taken from my colleagues like Jaiya and Charlie Glickman about the mechanics and communication behind more vanilla sex acts; also not forgetting the hundreds of hours I've spent reading books and articles on the cognitive psychology behind human behavior and relationships; then let's move on to more tangible skills that I've taught myself just for the fuck of it such as cooking, baking, mixology, massage; and of course the less tangible skill of reading people and just knowing things, acknowledging things in your partners that no one else has ever given them credit for, telling them the things they're only just beginning to realize about themselves, understanding why they do the things they do because you fucking pay attention to them, all while fucking their brains out in ways they've only dreamed of and supporting them emotionally through their trials and tribulations -- quite frankly you guys, I'm exhausted. And these aren't even skills I'm legally allowed to monetize, meaning I do all this on the side of actually culling together a living for myself.

Just part of my library on sex & relationships.

I've talked in a few recent interviews about the energy vampirism of the people who find me desirable because they sense the emotional labor I can perform for them. I've signed up for dating websites and received responses to my profile (where I am forthcoming about my work in seduction and my lifestyle of BDSM because I want to filter out the people who are going to find that weird) such as "Finally! Your exuberance and sexual adventurousness is exactly what I need after a 22-year monogamous relationship!" and "The only way to generate that sexual spark of curiosity is to be escorted by a supernatural pixie, my strongest desire has always come out by a brunette, it seems there's a depth in their dark sexual power that's like a falcon spirit that can swoop down and snatch you away" (I AM NOT KIDDING YOU GUYS I HAVE THE SCREENSHOT ON MY INSTAGRAM). And I feel that desire, that need to receive unidirectional healing from me, in real life too. I feel people approach me and I can smell it on them, and I want to scream, "Stop, stop it already! I am exhausted just looking at you!"

This was the trade-off, sadly. This is the devil I sold my soul to when I became Arden Leigh. I wanted to be desired on a mass level and good for me, I made my dream come true. But what I didn't realize is that it isn't enough to be wanted -- not if you want to be in a fulfilling relationship that meets your needs. You need to be met. You need to be matched by someone who can partner with you as an equal.

Ironically, after putting in my 10,000+ hours becoming a seduction expert, I've actually narrowed my field of potential partners. Life is cruel.

I know that life is not fair but I guess I am still having trouble grappling with the fact that my response to rejection was to learn the skill set of attraction so that I could be a better partner and the response to rejection from men like Ben Schoen is to retreat into the wound-licking cold comfort of sour grapes misogyny, the most unattractive response possible, and because I have spent over 10,000 hours cultivating compassion for men, I actually feel bad for them. My heart actually does go out to these guys who have decided that becoming a danger to women is the best way to deal with being found unattractive by them.

So here I am with my mad geisha skills hoping that somehow my personal transformation will attract a likeminded partner who has also done the same kind of work on himself, and I'm surrounded by a sea of fuckboys covered in Cheetos dust posting on Reddit about how much they hate women for not fucking them.

Fuckboys. Fuckboys, everywhere.

I am begging you guys. I am cheering for you. I am your biggest fucking fan. I want you to step up. I want you to do the work and be men. I want you to become humans who are capable of offering aid and protection in return for healing and communion. I want to be having amazing, lifechanging, thunderously connected sex with you, not getting pissed off about your insensitivity on the internet, and certainly not fearing for my physical and emotional safety around you.

But until you step up and do the masculine counterpoint work to the work that I've done on myself, you're just draining and exhausting me. You're seriously bumming me out. I've seen so many of you come so close to that transformation and then so fear the loss of your old self that you throw it all away and retreat again, and it breaks my fucking heart.

Just yesterday I posted an article on Facebook about how Straight Outta Compton adds a disturbing origin story to our favorite phrase "Bye, Felicia" by uttering it to a woman whilst throwing her naked out of a hotel room into a group of hostile armed men after she blows Eazy-E at a party, and with it I mentioned how angry I was that a writer, director, several producers, and a screening audience thought that it was funny for a group of men to assault and endanger a woman as thanks for her sexually performing for them. And you would not believe the amount of guys I had commenting in response that this woman, the fictional character, had it coming to her because she was engaging in sexually risky behavior. Um, guys... do you realize you are warning me and every other woman who reads your comments never to blow you? How is holding on to your misinformed, misogynist "she was asking for it" opinions worth cutting yourself off from the possibility of sexual intimacy with actual, real life, self-respecting women? Because we cannot feel okay about fucking you if we don't feel safe with you. (Guys... Felicia didn't endanger Dre and Eazy-E by cheating on her boyfriend with them. THE MEN WHO CAME IN WITH GUNS ENDANGERED THEM. Cheating warrants repercussions but those repercussions should come in the form of a breakup, not an assault.)

(With Straight Outta Compton I feel the need to add in an aside about how upsetting it is that we live in a system that gives more money to women's abusers to tell stories than to women. Nobody is producing the Dee Barnes Story. I've spent most of this year trying to work on a memoir about an abusive relationship that I don't even have a book deal for yet, which has meant reliving that trauma and doing that work while also supporting myself, which, to say that has been a difficult process would be the understatement of the year. And I feel like there are very few people right now who get that and who understand why Straight Outta Compton would be particularly upsetting for those reasons.)

I don't know what else to do, you guys. I'm really upset tonight. I am doing everything that I possibly fucking can and I am pretty sure my relationship skill set has reached the Law of Diminishing Returns. I don't want to snark, manhate, or get into fights with you. I don't wish for a war between the sexes, but I don't know what else to do, except be eternally grateful for my girlfriend who is currently, as I write this, offering me the emotional labor of her support over text because as a woman she too gets how shitty this feels.

Maybe this will reach some of you who are on the verge of retreating into MRA-land, and maybe it will save a few of you. Maybe it will bring back a few of you who are already there. Maybe a few of you will make some women happy one day. Maybe you will become men who are capable of that.

If you want to, and you need help, here some resources: I highly recommend checking out my friends Adam Lyons, Destin Gerek, Lawrence Lanoff, Charlie Glickman, Harris O'Malley aka Dr. Nerdlove, and/or Reid Mihalko, and seeking out some coaching on becoming evolved men. Like, don't take my word for it if you think "girls can't teach pickup." Take it from these dudes who are all in awesome, fulfilling relationships (usually of the non-monogamous variety, for those of you who think settling down is selling out). Full disclosure, they're my friends, but I don't make any money if you sign up with them, unless you sign up with Adam and do a residential program in which I help train you.

Other than that guys, I'm looking around me and searching for reasons why I should still remain on this planet. I can't express my frustration and alone-ness, but even if I could I'm really not confident it would be heard and received. I'm just seeking to be met and understood in the same way that I have cultivated myself to be able to understand.

07/21/2015

I'm sick today. I was in bed performing that awful mental gymnastics of weighing whether to muster enough strength to make it out to a grocery store for drugs and OJ or to call up a friend and ask them to make the run for me. I ran through a mental list of people to whom this might not sound totally weird and imposing, and naturally the only person to qualify was my girlfriend.

It wouldn't have been the first time. When I had a severe and completely unexpected depressive relapse in May, my girlfriend Ela was at my house with drugs, bandaids, antiseptic spray, and protein powder to keep my nutrient intake up during a time when I wasn't likely to be able to eat much. She was warm and affectionate when I needed it, but her caretaking of me was brisk, almost businesslike. Eat this. Take these. Let's put a bandaid on that. As though she'd done this many times before, which, in all likelihood, she probably had.

It reminded me of the 2002 movie Kissing Jessica Stein, a rom-com about two romantically frustrated women who decide to try lesbianism in order to get their needs met. Helen, a sexualized femme fatale gallery owner, tells her new girlfriend Jessica, a bookish news reporter, about the men she calls on for companionship: "I mean basically, I call Roland when I'm hungry, Steven when I'm bored, and Greg when I'm horny." "Who do you call when you're sick?" Jessica asks. "I don't get sick," Helen replies. Jessica retorts, "Oh. Good system." Like clockwork, later on in the movie Helen gets a cold, and it's Jessica who's showing up bringing her homemade chicken soup.

There are a lot of pieces going around the internet lately about women's unpaid emotional labor, and in the social media sphere I've no doubt been one of the loudest. It's so sensitive a subject that one seemingly innocuous joke from a male grocery cashier about how I should make him the apple pie I was obviously buying ingredients for had me take to Twitter in a rant about how it's not my job to heal all the men of the world through making them baked goods. Sure, it was only a joke, but when you're an attractive woman in this world -- especially one who seems to emanate give me your tired, your repressed, your sexually frustrated yearning to breathe free vibes wherever she goes -- jokes about free emotional labor are no longer fucking funny.

I went to a class that one of my colleagues was teaching once, and he had us partner up to do an exercise practicing asking for what we want. The exercise was supposed to go like this: one person would make a request, and the other person, no matter what the request was, would reply "Yes," just so the first person could experience what it felt like to hear an affirmative response. It was made clear, though possibly not quite clear enough, that the second person was not to perform the original request, just saying "yes" was enough. I was at the class being on brand as usual, heels and a red dress and red glass heart necklace around my neck, all purposeful seductive femininity. (I've noticed that when I wear my leather jacket and motorcycle boots, I can slip by much less noticed.) The man paired up with me was probably in his 60s, wearing a sea captain's hat and a smelly old sweater, and as he made his request, he said to me, "You look so beautiful, I saw you as soon as you came in the room, and it's been so long since I've had a woman in my life, and I just... could I just have a hug?"

I hugged him. It was easier than re-explaining the exercise to him and hurting his feelings by rejecting what on his part was clearly a very real request. I still feel awful about that interaction to this day, and I can still feel the scratchy wool of his navy sweater against me as he grasped me. I was a paying student in that class; I was not there being paid to heal other people. I was there to learn for myself. I learned a boundary that day and now when I attend my friends' classes, I sit out of any group exercises. In fact, I sit in the back like the too-cool rebel I am, because I'm in the field too and I'm there to support more than participate.

Similar was my singular experience at a speeddating event. For an hour I spent three minutes apiece on twenty men who filed before me at the sound of a bell, and in those three minutes I asked them about themselves, their hopes, their dreams, their favorite foods. I remember my voice getting tired by the end, and when the next man approached me, I said, "How about we spend the whole three minutes just looking into each other's eyes?" Afterward he said, "That was amazing! That was the best interaction yet!" At the end of the hour I was exhausted. Had I been a stripper, the sound of the bell after each three-minute interval would have instead shown up as the dj changing songs, and I would have said, "Oh hey, let's have a dance now," and I would have left with $400.

Sex work is in fact a place where women's emotional labor has a price, which is one theory about why it's so deeply vilified -- men don't want to pay for the things they feel entitled to for free, and women don't want other women selling those things to men for cash and thereby diluting their capacity to use them as barter for patriarchal tokens such as the security of marriage. Sex worker rights have become a far more hot button topic in recent years, and I'm hoping that full decriminalization will be the next step in American progress after the recent victory of marriage equality and what is no doubt about to be the inevitable countrywide legalization of marijuana. The industry of sex work, including work such as stripping and pro-BDSM where intercourse itself typically doesn't happen, is confirmation of the fact that women's companionship, conversational skills, and willingness to be sexualized are things that have monetary value.

The blog HoboStripper wrote about "the cosmic titty," the construct that to be feminine is to play the role of selfless caregiver to men: "The strip club teaches that cosmic tittage, rather than being the birthright of all men and the duty of all women, is a significant exchange of energy that we should be compensated for." The author goes on to describe two times in her childhood that she played the role of cosmic titty -- once to her 30-year-old male babysitter, and once to her dad. I too can remember the awkwardness of my abusive bio-dad crying to me, and the weird way I felt obligated to tell him everything was going to be okay.

Of course, once upon a time, before the takeover of Christianity and the fall of goddess culture, women were revered and protected for their roles. They were the original priestesses, women skilled in the arts of love who would counsel and fuck their devotees in order to help them attain spiritual communion, because sex was (rightfully) seen as the gateway to spirit. Importantly, their societies valued them and protected them as resources, unlike our society's denigration of "hookers and strippers." Today's Delphic oracles are also more likely to show up as women who hold down everyday jobs to pay their rent while also offering counsel for free to the men in their lives, as in Jess Zimmerman's account for The Toast: "I’ve fielded hundreds of late-night texts, balanced reassurance with tough love, hammered away at stubborn beliefs, sometimes even taken (shudder) phone calls. I’ve actually been on agony aunt duty for male friends since high school, so if it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, counseling bereft dudes may in fact be my only expert skill."

Modern Oracles at Delphi wear Agent Provocateur.

Of course, I get a disproportionate amount of requests for help and healing because of my job, too -- the difference there is that when something is my job, I can charge for it. The most respectful emails I receive are short and to the point, soliciting my coaching and asking my rates before even bringing up specifics regarding the situation on which they're seeking counsel; others, not as respectful of my time, will write thousands of words in an email about the boy or girl who's breaking their heart and then close with, "So, any advice?" The fact that the people behind the latter emails assume I am going to give them my time for free by reading their lengthy confessions is already insulting -- not to mention that I have a separate email address for free inquiries to my Ask Arden advice column for Auxiliary magazine. Maybe there are bloggers out there who are more generous with their time than I am, but I'd like to see you try to go into a doctor's office and list off all your symptoms to them without incurring a consultation fee.

About a month ago, Twitter saw the fascinating development of the hashtag #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, developed by Lauren Chief Elk and Bardot Smith. It was an exquisite point that was unfortunately wrapped in the trappings of popular misandry unlikely to appeal to anyone except similar women, and so I sincerely doubt any men were convinced to compensate the women in their lives any more than before. Nor was it helped by the fact that it was in part developed and trended by a number of financial dommes -- in character, not as women who happen to earn a living as dommes -- who appeal to a very niche market share of men. Most misinterpreted it as trying to say that men should fork over their money to random women for no reason other than perhaps their good looks (the maintenance of which, by the way guys, usually costs women a lot of money!), and so many #getajob tweets were hashtagged in response. Other men made jokes about strippers and hookers, and the fact that these were jokes rather than serious estimations of women engaging in consensual financial transactions for their skill sets was rather poignant. One tweeter, though, Trudy, got it right: "If you have the means, find 3 women whose knowledge on here has changed you and donate to their work right now."

That hit home. I blog and tweet about relationships and sexuality in such a way that many people, men especially, email me and tell me that my work has changed their lives for the better. I am always happy to hear that my work is resonating in the world, and it is nice to read that kind of feedback. But there's a bit of a sting to it sometimes, a sting that could be mitigated by these readers paying for an hour of coaching, or buying a few copies of my book to give to their friends. It's super cool that my labor has made your life better, but maybe you could do something in return to make mine better too? (One woman, afraid of buying my book with her credit card lest her husband spot the purchase, even straight-up told me she had gotten it for free as part of some Amazon Kindle free trial, which, if you don't get how offensive that is to an author, please only email me if you want coaching on empathy and manners.)

I have a poor history of free emotional labor, which is probably why this subject is such a sensitive one to me. During my awkward years in my teens and early twenties, I didn't possess the sight or empathy that would allow me to perform the task of caretaking men, and I envied the desirability of women who did. Becoming a pro-domme helped me to develop those skills, and studying seduction took them even further. In particular, Robert Greene's The Art of Seduction, the first book I ever read on the subject, advocates for a great deal of labor on the part of the seducer (though to his credit, he advocates just as much emotional labor on the part of male seducers as on their seductress counterparts, even if the kinds of emotional labor are at times gendered). Newly minted in the art, I took my temptress toolbox and went to town, and I found that putting in work got me decent results. I spent years in New York reveling in my role as the rockstar courtesan, baking cookies to take backstage to my favorite bands, inviting the scene's most talented musicians into my home where I'd pour them a glass of wine, make dinner, and fuck their brains out. And hey, I got some incredible experiences and relationships with the men I wanted, something my former self would never have been able to do. But after a while it got old. So many of them would leave and I would feel deeply unchanged. I was enjoying their company, but they were having no effect on me, because I wasn't allowing myself to be taken care of in return. It felt safer at the time to utilize the role of caretaker in order to maintain a position of power, because vulnerability is scary, and it's easier to do wifey shit for fuckboys than it is to admit that you need someone.

I'd be remiss here if I didn't also mention the fact that I identify as a service-oriented submissive, which means that I literally get off on performing labor for people I'm romantically involved with. I have my theories about this possibly relating to conditioning from a former D/s relationship and how it links to my attachment anxiety, but at the end of the day, it's a turn-on and I'm happy that I was able to transmute my issues into something positive. It also, however, means that I sometimes end up taken advantage of in relationships because free labor tends to attract narcissists -- although the symbiosis of giver and taker has sometimes maintained a weird but workable equilibrium, even if there was a ceiling to the potential intimacy therein. Conversely, I've been with guys for whom my service has brought up their self-worth issues, because receiving gracefully is difficult if in your heart you believe you're undeserving. And then the resulting shame from that self-examination gets unfairly conflated with me and taken out on me in not-so-subtle ways. So I'm not necessarily arguing against women's emotional labor, as long as they're volunteering it, because that would make me a hypocrite. I'm saying that in order for it to work, there needs to be an understanding and appreciation of what it means both to give and receive.

I've written and ranted some about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, the popular cinematic construct that for every moody and stunted Zach Braff there is a bubbly and adventurous Natalie Portman ready to zest up his life with her feminine charms. I don't actually have a problem with the trope itself, as I find the MPDG no less realistic than any other aspirational fiction. What I do have a problem with is how much her emotional labor goes unreciprocated (and how much the male counterpart to the MPDG, the Gothic Pixie Dream Boy, seems to live only onscreen without being appropriated to gain desirability by real-life men as the MPDG is by women). Women need support too, and arguably more so as we live in a patriarchy; there is something perverse about a person from a marginalized group dedicating her resources to the self-actualization of someone with exponentially more privilege (cue cringeing as I note that people in the BDSM community also face an extra layer of marginalization). If you are a privileged man living in a patriarchy and you have personally benefited from a relationship with an MPDG, you had better open your eyes to the struggles that she too faces every day, and you had better fucking fight for her. You have infinitely more resources than she does, and while your problems are real, they're likely not systemic as hers are. Nor is her pain any less real because you think she's pretty and probably has access to (bad, unsatisfying, potentially harmful) sex whenever she wants it, but that's a post for another day.

Healthy relationships are balanced relationships. Not every partner has to bring the same value to the table, but there must be reciprocity, and co-regulation, the very obvious concept that a relationship should entail two people giving a fuck about each other's well-being. Here we can get into the dubious concepts of masculinity and femininity, and what strengths each brings to the table. Women are, biologically speaking, better at listening, empathizing, and reading subtle social cues. Men are not obligated to reciprocate with the same set of feminine skill sets, but there has to be something that is given in return.

I've started to think of masculinity as being the quality of doing whatever needs to be done in the room, and the scope of sight that that entails. In February I went to a house party, and late in the night, as I was chatting with some guests by the fireplace, I looked up and saw my date helping to carry a woman who had passed out from drinking. Of course, I thought proudly. Of course he's the one who's going to stand up and help out. Similarly, I was at a fetish party this past weekend, and my friend Sir Rucifer saw me struggling to unfasten my corset and immediately came over and helped me with it. He also managed, even in the midst of scening with me, to spot a woman across the room whose boundaries he suspected were being violated by her scene partner and to send a friend over to make sure everything was okay and report back to him. At any Stockroom class, he'll sit in the back unobtrusively but be the first to start putting the chairs away as soon as it's over. He does whatever needs to be done in the room.

Femininity, I've decided at the moment, is to offer healing and communion; masculinity is to offer aid and protection.

In the majority of my past relationships, I've been endangered more than I've been protected. My move west has helped things a bit. I have better male friends here, especially in the kink and sexuality communities, who have helped model better behavior for me, the kinds of things that I want to see from potential partners. I've watched my bestie Adam Lyons as he provides for a family consisting of two girlfriends and two kids, and manages a business with at least ten staff members, one of whom is me. I've learned that just because you can seduce anyone you want with the emotional labor of a seductress doesn't always mean you should. I've learned that there is value in the work I do, whether it's the pies I bake, the blowjobs I give, or the counsel I dispense, and that that value needs to be met by someone who appreciates it with more than just lip service. I need a partner who will protect me as a resource.

I didn't end up calling Ela today. Instead I went to the urgent care for an antibiotic in a visit that my insurance didn't cover (hey, who wants to give me $195?), and then came home to nap and write this blog post from bed. It feels good to write but it also feels a little sad knowing I'm spending my sick day doing work to benefit others while I keep insisting on doing my own caretaking all by myself. Maybe I should have paid more attention in that "asking for what you want" exercise after all, because clearly I'm still learning that lesson while the old man in the navy sweater went away with more than his money's worth for the class.

I don't want this to embitter me. I don't want my softness and femininity to become collateral damage in the fight to protect myself from being usurped. I love men and I want to love them, I want to be there for them and do the things that I do best. But I need that investment returned. All women do.

I know that it's a difficult age in which to be a man. I've written about it. But I'd like more men acknowledging that it's a difficult age in which to be a woman, too, and maybe to display a little more empathy for it.

ETA: A few people have asked whether I have a paypal or a Patreon. I do have a paypal, it's ardensirens@gmail.com which is the same as my contact email. I'm working on setting up a Patreon. Thanks. :)

"I appreciate you doing a feature on me," she writes. "But really, I don’t appreciate being made to sound like a stupid whore. I understand your readers might prefer that type of fare, but I prefer to be a little bit more real."

I'd like to pull more quotes from the piece here but I'd be pulling the entire thing. Let's just say that Hustler, for some reason, decided it would be more interesting to paint Casey as a "bad girl" troubled college drop-out who rock climbs to "stay limber" (for teh secks, of course!) than to accurately depict her as the magna cum laude college graduate nationally ranked competitive athlete she is, who also happens to be into kink, and who chose to make a career in fetish porn so that she could get her needs met safely.

They even got her hometown wrong. (And implied that she was disappointed that her parents didn't spank her, which... ugh, that's so gross I feel weird typing it.)

I don't know Casey personally. I don't know what it was like for her to do that interview, for her to invite a journalist along to watch her rock climb, and then into her own home to watch her do a bondage and impact scene with a rigger. I am guessing that Casey doesn't have nearly as much trauma associated with her kink as I do -- only because I generally guess that nobody has as much trauma associated with their kink as I do -- so maybe this wasn't nearly as heavy an event for her as it would have been for me. But still. She opened up to Hustler, answered their questions, and invited them into her own home to watch her play, and in return they decided to turn her entire kink narrative into something that was not hers. I know if that were me, I'd feel even more violated than I would if someone assaulted me. (I've been both sexually assaulted and misquoted in the press and the latter felt worse. It lasted longer and there were more witnesses.)

It is hard enough as it is for human beings to talk about their sexualities. It is hard because we as a society stigmatize it. And yet, some brave souls do it anyway, despite knowing how much shit they're going to take for it, because it is important work to let people know that they are not alone in feeling the things they feel, and because for some of us, it doesn't much feel like a choice.

I gave a talk at InsTED yesterday (go watch it online, I only had five days' notice to prep it and I was super proud of myself for pulling it off), and afterward, one of the other speakers approached me in a very friendly manner to talk about some of the things I'd mentioned. As we talked, he mentioned that he is writing a book on hypocrisy, and that he is in favor of it, that he thinks as human beings we are hard-wired to be dishonest about who we are. I looked at him deadpan and said, "It would be infinitely easier for me if I were able to be dishonest about who I am. But I can't." Then I got up and left, because I didn't have the patience for a "friendly debate" that was likely to trigger my sexual shame.

For whatever reason, people like me and Casey have decided to be transparent about our sexualities, and that is not an easy thing to do, but it is an important thing to do, because there are many people in the world who suffer in silence because they feel alone, different, and shameful because of their desires. And instead of having her story honored for her bravery, Casey instead had hers twisted and warped to make it look like she was a fucked-up, damaged individual just looking for a trite time with some "whips" (the word Hustler chose to give to every single BDSM impact toy regardless of its actual name).

THIS IS WHY IT IS SO HARD FOR US TO TALK ABOUT OUR KINK. Because even when we sit there with you and tell you the truth as hard we as can -- and believe me, explaining ourselves gets fucking old after awhile -- you still blatantly refuse to fucking get it.

It's an epidemic that goes further than journalism. It's about people being human beings. Journalists are people, and those people write articles that other people read, and then those other people sit across from us at a dinner table and try to get to know us, or worse, they somehow manage to get into bed with us, and they think they have us figured out because of the shit they read somewhere. I touched on this in this post about the kinds of guys who look at my kink as a shortcut to a good time without needing to, you know, actually get to know why I'm like this, and again in the intro I wrote to the new edition of my late mentor Flagg's book The Forked Tongue about how people's reduction of my sexuality into silly tropes actually makes me feel far more unsafe than their judgments.

It is hard enough that my sexuality led to events such as my watching my then-boyfriend/Dominant led away from me in handcuffs, being outed in the New York Post (there isn't a photo in that link but ohhh there was at the time, and in the print edition it took up nearly a full page), losing all my money to his legal defense, having my pro-domme career ended through an email hack, being ostracized (to put it lightly) from the public BDSM scene, and being embroiled in a Dominant/submissive relationship that turned abusive WITHOUT you fuckers adding to the shame and confusion that goes into that mix.

It is hard enough inviting a person into the sacred space that is my sexuality, a space that is now so loaded with heaviness and trauma, and having to explain what I like and why I'm wired this way and asking them to see it and hold it WITHOUT all of it being twisted into a public narrative that has nothing to do with me.

It is hard enough for me to accept myself, to feel like I am going to be okay and maybe one day accepted and loved for who I am without having to hide anything out of shame, WITHOUT the media constantly punching me in the fucking face with their fucking lame-ass kink puns and trivialization of what I assure you is the most difficult thing I have had to fucking live with and that's coming from someone who grew up with an abusive dad.

Fuck you. Fuck you all.

How do you expect me to feel anything but despair when my greatest (and sometimes only) source of peace and satisfaction is the punchline of a fucking joke to you?

Let me point out a discrepancy in Casey's Hustler article that is a rather all-encompassing metaphor for something you get deeply wrong about us:

Hustler:

What Casey prefers on a date is to be tied up, hands and feet bound tightly behind her like a farm animal about to be branded. Then she likes a butt plug stuck in her ass. Then she likes to be whipped. Hard. With a bare hand, paddle or leather belt.

Casey:

1. No bondage on a first date. Not unless they’ve been seriously vetted. 2. I actually don’t really like butt plugs, and I HATE having anything in my ass while being spanked. 3. Yes, I enjoy being whipped. With a whip. I also enjoy being spanked with a hand, paddled with a paddle, and slapped with a leather belt. Verbs, people.

Hustler, your portrayal of Casey as someone who likes to be tied up and buttplugged on the first date is exactly the stigma kinky people face that makes us terrified of first dates. Because we're afraid that we're going to tell our dates that we like being tied up, and they're going to assume that means we like being tied up on first dates, that because we like being tied up we also like other things like buttplugs (which we may or may not, but clearly in this case you either didn't ask Casey or you just didn't listen to her answer), and that paddles and leather belts are called whips.

I'm exhausted. I'm tired of explaining myself. I am going to write this memoir -- which, by the way, feels like being hit by a truck every time I make progress on it -- and hope that it heals some of the wounds around my experiences so that my sex life won't feel like such a fucking heavy thing to have to hand over to any potential partners. I am praying that I can write myself out of this fucking despair and that somewhere at the end of this draft there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, or at the very least, that I can just give it to people to read before they involve themselves with me so I don't have to fucking explain myself all over again.

Do better, world. If you think you might ever want to fuck someone like Casey or me you're going to have to do a much better job of understanding us, making us feel safe, and treating us like we're people.